Stuff UK November 2022

Hello and welcome to this creator-focused issue of Stuff! That’s right – the spotlight’s on making your own digital creations this time around, and our cover feature takes you through a bunch of top accessories and add-ons to improve your lot – whether you’re shooting a 4K promo video, recording another podcast about football, DJing to your local political-party-agnostic members’ club, designing your wedding invitations or power-editing your best photos. And that’s not all on the creative front – we’ve got a whole extra section on creator hardware in association with Nvidia. So you can enjoy the best in high-end laptops, tablets, mirrorless cameras, action cams and more to push your projects to the next level. Elsewhere we’ve previewed all of Apple’s new gear, including the iPhone 14 Pro with its interesting…

The notch is dead, long live the Dynamic Island! Ever since Apple culled the home button and introduced that divisive screen cut-out, the brand’s acolytes (Applytes?) have wondered when the iPhone would follow Android’s lead and shrink it down to almost nothing. But it turns out the bods in Cupertino have been working on something better. An eye-catching fusion of hardware and software, the iPhone 14 Pro’s Dynamic Island is a pill-shaped expand-o-lozenge that contains the Face ID camera but is also a vital part of the UI (even if it does sound like a yoga pose). Apps are sucked into it, notifications burst out of it, travel directions and music controls enlarge it, and it splits in two when it has more than one job to do. It floats within a…

iPhone 14 The standard iPhone 14 still has the old-style notch and doesn’t get the always-on screen or A16 chip, but there’s a new 12MP camera on the back with a larger sensor for better snaps in low light. from £849 AirPods Pro (2nd Gen) The new Pro buds might look the same but there’s some niftily improved tech inside – like Adaptive Transparency, which still lets in some sounds from the outside world but reduces the intensity of sudden loud noises. £249 Watch Series 8 All the new iPhones now have Crash Detection, and that’s part of the Apple Watch Series 8 too. There’s also a new temperature sensor, as on the Ultra (see p14), that can be used to better predict menstrual cycles. from £419…

Curved tellies might have gone the same way as 3D films, Betamax and the Monty Python parrot, but gamers loved the extra immersion offered by having the corners of the screen bent in towards them… so LG’s new monitor delivers the best of both worlds. The 42in OLED Flex LX3 has a motorised bending system, so you can switch between a curved screen and a flat one at the touch of a button. The remote lets you choose between fully flat, a slight bend or a full 900R curve, but there’s also an onscreen menu that lets you tweak it at 5% intervals. The 4K 120Hz panel uses the same Alpha 9 Gen 5 image processor you’ll find in LG’s OLED tellies, so you can expect vibrant colours, inky blacks and…

Unless you’ve got the machine from Honey, I Shrunk The Kids in your attic, it’s impossible to know what it’s really like to fly aboard a drone – but DJI’s Avata can give you a pretty good idea. While this is not the first drone to put you in an imaginary cockpit via a pair of goggles, it should be the easiest of DJI’s first-person squadron to keep in the air. Its propeller guards mean a collision won’t necessarily cause a crash – but if an unscheduled meeting with terra firma does take place, its self-righting Turtle mode will have it upright and back in the air in no time at all. And the onboard camera doesn’t just stream a drone’s-eye view to the headset – it also shoots 4K/60p video…

Back when Philips first started cramming coloured lights into its tellies, 4K was just a cool way of spelling ‘fork’ and our idea of a good night in was Fame Academy or Footballers’ Wives. Fortunately, the world looks a lot different 20 years later, so it’s about time some of Philips’ other tech got the Ambilight treatment. The eight LEDs built into the back of the FS1 speaker can be set to react to the music it’s playing, or simply provide some nice mood lighting. But it’s when you link it to a similarly illuminated telly – either as a satellite in a surround-sound system or as left and right channels in a pair – that it really comes to life, synchronising with the screen’s Ambilight. Inside you’ll find a 3.5in woofer,…